my cat, Mab
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| Let's talk about ... cats, dogs, horses, bunnies, hamsters... or anything with fur! (or feathers, not sure about scales though) |
Pasha
(from “Pasha, From Animal Shelter to a Sheltered Life)
by Inge H. Borg
The orange tom brought to the Shelter by Animal Control was messy. And he stank. As no one ever claimed him, Cody was whisked off for the ignoble deed every shelter animal is subjected to before it can be adopted out.
As I did my volunteer scooping in the “cat house,” that darn cat never took his eyes off me. They were not quite green and not quite yellow; they were round, and alert, and reflected light like precious stones set in orange gold.
“Don’t even think about it,” I told him. I already had two cats.
*
I named him Pasha.
“What’s a Pasha?” I was asked. And I replied that, just like his royal namesake of by-gone middle-Eastern splendor in One Thousand and One Nights, “he sits on silk cushions and surveys his harem.”
His adoring entourage was comprised of NickNack, a gleaming-white, black-tailed Turkish Van (slightly prissy and mostly preferring her own company), and Lilliput, my other shelter-rescue, also a Maine Coon (laid-back and gorgeous but, due to her flabby tummy, no longer Lilliputian) and, of course, me—their female servant of the human species. They say pets resemble their owners. If that’s true, I deny everything except for the ‘gorgeous’ part.
Pasha turned out to be an incredibly loving, sweet Maine Coon; he got along with everyone. He was also the only cat that ever bit me; and I mean, hard. But that was entirely my own stupid fault.
One noon, he danced expectantly around my feet waiting for his lunch while I warmed up the remainder of his can left over from breakfast. Suddenly, a blood-curdling howl! I stared down. Blood spurted high across the kitchen floor.
“Oh my God! I’ve severed his foot.” I had stepped on his paw. Utterly stunned, I picked up the equally traumatized cat. There was no blood on him and all of his four paws were still solidly attached to his body, although he held one out rather gingerly. I tried to ‘kiss it better.’ Where then did all that blood come from?
In sudden pain, Pasha had whipped around and sunk his fangs precisely into the large vein on top of my foot puncturing it twice in snake-like fashion. Even with my relatively low blood pressure, that thing ballooned, rearing up like an enraged cobra. Happy that it was I who was doing the bleeding, I stuck my foot into the kitchen sink and ran cold water over it until the red flow stopped.
Both Pasha and I were soon right as rain and I fervently hoped he would forgive me as I profusely apologized to him, promising to be a lot more careful in the future.
I really did promise. Alas ...
* * *
another story about Pasha coming soon!
but meanwhile...
Excerpted from Borg’s Pasha, From Animal Shelter to a Sheltered Life,
Available from Amazon –
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| http://www.amazon.com/Inge-H.-Borg/e/B006QYQKUS |
Thank you so much, Helen, for giving my Furries and me this opportunity to be here. The cat in the photo with me is Lilliput, now sixteen and long suffering through the furry additions I have hauled in over the years. And, we will meet again with another Pasha Story on June 4th.
ReplyDeleteMy pleasure Inge - it was lovely to 'meet' Pasha.
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